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dulcidyne · 5 months ago

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Tibias and Toe Picks

DA:VG//Emmrich x Rook//SFW//Complete Read on AO3!

It is a cold Wintermarch day and the River Minanter frost fair is in full swing. Emmrich frets, Rook improvises, and Manfred? Manfred skates, of course.

It was a cold Wintermarch day, and the Minanter was a shimmery silver ribbon unspooling a lopsided bow through the city before trailing off into the frost-flocked eastern foothills. Manfred pointed to the dark specks and rainbow flecks dotting busily over distant the frozen river with his most excited hiss.

“Skate!”

Rook, leaning into Emmrich for warmth, her arm wrapped round his, looked up with cold-flushed cheeks and incredulity. “Manfred can ice skate?”

Emmrich winced, folding his palm over the mittened fingertips curling against his forearm. “He...has been making some progress over the years. Last winter, he only fractured the one patella, which was a remarkable improvement.”

“Ahhh,” she said knowingly, then smiled, her eyes dancing as she leaned up to press a kiss to his cheek.

“Couldn’t stop him, could you?” she guessed as she drew back. Her breath was a faint, warm puff against his skin.

“I try every year,” Emmrich lamented. “To no avail. He simply will not be dissuaded. It’s all I can do to minimize the damage.”

“Well, don’t worry,” she said, unlooping her arm from his to clasp his hands in her wool-knit fingers and level him her most confident smile. “This year you have me. I can help.”

A ‘don’t worry’ from anyone who wasn’t Rook would’ve only earned them a displeased frown. On principle, Emmrich took exception to such advice from colleagues and friends. ‘Don’t worry so much’—the careless and willful ignorance of the perpetually blasé. The aggravating simplicity of rephrasing the impossible into the prosaic. Oh, just like that? Don’t worry? Why, what a fool he’d been all this time. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?!

But Rook’s ‘don’t worry’s were never advice or condescensions—they were promises. And a promise from Rook was not a thing to take lightly. She had a knack for achieving the impossible. If anyone could keep Manfred’s patellae intact, it was her.

Comforted, Emmrich smiled down at her upturned face before loosening his hand from her grip to trace his thumb over the high curve of one cold-pinked cheek. He could still scarcely believe all this was real, that she was really there with him, after everything that had happened. Even after so many months, half of him expected to wake up any moment and find himself back at his desk in the Lighthouse, surrounded by scattered papers and thrown-open texts, the lyrium knife a gleaming taunt as their last words to each other resurfaced over and over in his mind.

But she’d made him a promise, and she was not a woman to be gainsaid. Fade prisons and gods be damned. And so, here she was, whole and perfect, her face a striking geometry of cheekbone, brow, jaw, and chin softened by her smile and the blush of cold. Pale constellations of snowflakes freckled over the wind-tangled wisps slipping free from the midnight blue of her cloak’s hood. He watched, utterly entranced, as a few lacy flecks dusted over the ruddy tip of her nose like confectioner’s sugar. Unable to resist the temptation, he kissed it, half expecting her to taste as sweet as she looked.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she only tasted of cold water. Until she canted her chin back and wound her fingers around the nape of his neck to reclaim the melted snow still on his lips. Emmrich sighed against the bold brush of her tongue, the warm, luxuriant glide faintly spiced with cinnamon and clove from the tea she’d downed like a shot right before they’d set out.

The world unraveled around them, dissolving like the sugar cubes in her tea. There was only the press of her mouth against his, a slow, languid pull drawing him deeper into the soft, Rook-hazed eddies of spices and mingling sighs. It felt like stepping into a dream, the husky note curling at the base of her throat re-weaving reality with borrowed threads of the Fade. Everything was brighter. More beautiful. Colors coruscating in the dusk of his lidded eyes.

“Skate!” Manfred cried out again, befuddled and aggravated by their delay. “Not kiss.”

Rook broke away with a stifled giggle. As yet, none of their explanations had managed to provide his erstwhile assistant with any real understanding of the concept of a ‘kiss’ or why Rook and he had been…ah…rather preoccupied with the practice over the past several months.

“Sorry, Manfred,” she said, her smile crooking at a chiding angle as she leaned back against Emmrich’s hands fitted round her waist. “But this time, it wasn’t my fault.”

“I’m afraid it was, darling,” Emmrich argued, stealing one last kiss from her lips before drawing back and folding her arm around his in a single, smooth gesture. “It invariably is. Even when it isn’t.”

She settled against his side, fitting as snugly as if she were made for it. Or maybe the other way around—as if it had been made for her. Blasphemous as it was, he didn’t believe in the Maker’s will. Andrastrianism had abandoned him the moment he’d plucked his mother’s teacup from the rubble of their home. But in moments like these, he wondered if he should believe in something. In the divinity that existed between her shoulder and his side, a perfection of hollows and contours finding their respective matches. It was so small, but…he was more in awe of it than he’d ever been of any golden Chantry statue.

“Hardly seems fair,” she said with a playful sigh gusting up through a snowflake-studded curl.

“Dearest, imagine how I feel,” he replied, pulling her closer to his side as the snow crunched beneath their boots and Manfred ambled ahead.

As they drew closer to the riverbank, the smells of the frost fair food stalls curled beckoning fingers on every chill gust. Caramelized sugar and fried dough sprinkled with Rivaini cinnamon and nutmeg, roasted chestnuts and savory potato cakes laden with sage and rosemary. Beneath—the sharp, herbaceous whiff of balsam resin and juniper berries, clove-studded wheels of dried citron rinds fastened to garlands looped with diaphanous black crêpe to honor the ancestral dead as Nevarrans did in all celebrations.

Rook tipped her head to the side to nuzzle against his shoulder as she inhaled deeply. “When I was a child, I told myself one day I’d buy something from every single food stall at the frost fair.”

Emmrich chuckled, scanning the multicolored banners of the stall awnings garlanding the frozen riverbank in two opposing rainbows of oversized fabric pennants. He couldn’t even begin to count them all. As a child, his hopes had always been confined to a single pastry or a hot paper cone of chestnuts shared with his parents.

“You were always ambitious, then?”

“I don’t believe in doing things by halves,” she joked, cutting him a wry, sideways glance before her voice dropped into something softer. “It wasn’t so much about wanting the food as it was about wanting what the people with the food had. Seeing the parents and children and lovers and families huddling around the stalls, sharing and passing it around. To my mind, having neither, the food was the essential bit, so of course my dream was to get as much of that as possible.”

“Darling,” he uttered, pausing as they passed beneath one of the towering Van Markham statues lining the end of the boulevard.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him, playfully misinterpreting his dismay. “With you and Manfred with me, I’m sure I’ll be just as happy only buying food from half the stalls.”

Once again, it was entirely her fault when he kissed her. And this time, she was the one sighing against his lips, her generous mouth parting, pliant. It only made him restless and greedy. His arms found their way around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest as he drew back into the shadow of the statue, away from any prying glances from the boulevard’s passers by.

“Highly…improper,” she teased, words catching between kisses, her mittened fingertips knitting round his neck.

“Your influence,” Emmrich whispered breathlessly. The full jut of her bottom lip was endlessly fascinating. Petulant and petal soft. He could devote himself to the study of it and nothing else for years. Write an entire thesis on it. With footnotes, he thought headily, arms full of her, his teeth grazing needy indents into her lip as he hauled her against him. The dip of her hip against his thigh—half divine, half dream.

“Skaaate!” Manfred cried out, dragging the word out as if he’d been mortally wounded and this was his dying moan. And then again and again. Until he was repeating one unending litany of, “Skateskateskateskate.”

“Manfred’s right,” Rook sighed, drawing her fallen hood back over her hair after they extricated themselves from the impassioned embrace with clumsy, wobbling limbs. “We’ll never make it to the fair before dusk at this rate.”

Emmrich cleared his throat and straightened his tie pin—her roaming hands always left it a little crooked. “Yes, but, nevertheless. Patience and discipline are qualities we must strive to embody, no matter the circumstance.”

Manfred did an impressive job of looking utterly betrayed, his emeralds glinting with an aggrieved sheen as he stared up at Emmrich with a slackened mandible.

Rook cocked her head and laughed. “Is this lecture for us or for Manfred?”

Well… that was fair. He was painting a very fine picture of a hypocrite at the moment. Emmrich’s already warm neck warmed hotter, and he coughed delicately. After all his lectures and lessons—to be so easily overcome by his own desires and feelings. Besotted, he’d ruefully called it once. But he no longer felt any regret over losing his head around her. Rook was a veritable bundle of impulses and improvisation wrapped up in a lovely bow. She kissed him in public, on the street, without a thought or a care who might be watching. Pulled him back into bed when he rose at dawn, distracted him from his books and research, waylaid his lectures and lessons. And he loved every minute of it. There was a charm to a life with a little less regimentation.

Or maybe there was just charm to a life with Rook in it.

Either way, he’d come to realize since their relationship began that his much lauded virtue of ‘patience’ was highly contingent on the strength of his desires. He was not, as it turned out, actually all too patient a man where Rook was concerned.

“A fine point,” he conceded. “My apologies for all the delays, Manfred.”

With a hiss of forgiveness, Manfred accepted the apology, and they made their way down to the river without (much) incident, arriving well before dusk just as the band began to play. The atmosphere on the ice was as jubilant as the rich smells from the stalls, laughter and voices rising into the air with the cheery carnival sounds of strings and brass, a trilling piccolo cutting through the happy shrieks of a gaggle of children racing past on sleds. Manfred goggled at the sight, nearly taking off after them before Rook and Emmrich wrangled him over towards the quieter side of the river, away from the tents and stalls offering ale, mulled wine, and coffee and over towards one of the puppet plays re-enacting a famous Pentaghast dragon hunt for a group of younger children.

With Manfred momentarily distracted by puppets, Emmrich rifled through his pack and produced stacks of handsewn leather pads.

“These go on the joints,” he told Rook. “And these on the long bones. Do try to tie them as tight as possible or they will slip off.”

He showed her how best to fasten the knots and left her to it, before returning to the pack for the quilted gambeson and chausses. Rook’s glance flicked up to the gambeson, and she blinked.

“Emmrich, that’s—” “Too thin, do you think?” he asked, holding it out for inspection. He’d had Manfred sew in an additional layer of padding after last year’s patella incident, and the garment was now about the thickness of Emmrich’s pinkie.

“Thin is not the word I’d use,” Rook said, smiling as she tugged the last of the fastenings tight around an ulna.

Together, they managed to stuff Manfred, who was now giddy and fidgeting with excitement, into the unwieldy gambeson. The chausses after. At last, Emmrich produced a pair of modified bone skates and skating poles.

“He does much better with the older skates and poles,” he informed Rook, fitting the first shearling-soled skate to Manfred’s nubbly calcaneus. “I shudder to think how much harm he’d come to with the metal blade alternative.”

Rook smiled indulgently, helping him fasten on the second skate to his other foot.

And with that, at last, Manfred was ready. Rook stepped back and took one sweeping look from cranium to talus, before dissolving into fits of laughter so hard, she doubled over and clutched her midsection.

With the additional padding, the gambeson now had a rather…rotund appearance. Not so much as an inch of pale bone was visible beneath the swaddling quilt, knit, and shearling—just Manfred’s pair of glowing faceted emeralds. At a glance and from far away, instead of a skeleton, one might see a strangely proportioned but portly living man.

“Skate!” Manfred cackled in glee from beneath the padded skullcap and wool knit scarf wrapped thrice round his cervical vertebrae.

Emmrich smiled as Rook wiped away her tears of mirth onto her mittens.

“You look very handsome, Manfred,” she said at last. “And most importantly, very safe,”

“Yes, well,” Emmrich said, retrieving the two pairs of iron and wood skating blades from the bottom of the mostly empty pack. “After you, my dear.”

Dropping to a crouch, he held his hands out for her boot so that he could assist her in fastening them on—a rather complicated process. She’d worn her oldest pair for some reason; the outsoles worn so smooth, it was a miracle she hadn’t slipped on the icy cobbles on their way there.

Rook blinked down at him, confused for a moment before comprehension banished the tiny furrow between her brows. “Emmrich, I can’t skate with those,” she said. “I’ll sprain both ankles in the minute!”

Ah. It hadn’t occurred to him, but of course it should have—while there were a good number with metal skates like the ones he had in his hands, most of Nevarra City’s poor made do without, simply sliding across the ice in their own shoes. Iron was an expensive commodity, an exorbitant purchase for the handful of weeks in the year when the river froze solid enough for skating. Hadn’t he learned with just his own boots, all those years ago?

He also realized belatedly why she’d worn those particular boots.

“It’s not very different, you see,” he explained, standing to fasten the blade contraption over his own boot. “The blades lie nearly flat on the outsole; the advantage is that the metal produces less friction.” Lacing it tight, he tested his weight to ensure the bindings were holding appropriately, then skimmed his heel against the ice in one short glide to show her.

Rook only looked skeptical. “Let’s deal with one novice at a time, shall we?” she suggested. “Or we’ll have four broken patellae on our hands.” There was certainly wisdom in that, so Emmrich finished fitting the second blade on his boot before returning her pair to Manfred’s pack. Standing, he took Manfred’s left side and Rook took his right. Manfred pushed off with the sticks in one faltering glide before immediately veering, then tipping over onto Rook.

She might’ve withstood the sudden onslaught of skeletal limbs…if it weren’t for that gambeson. With the increased bulk came increased weight, and the pair of them collapsed onto the ice with a co-mingled shriek and hiss.

Emmrich cried out their names in succession, leaning over them to grasp one of the flailing limbs. As Manfred struggled like an upturned turtle, Rook rolled onto her back, still half-pinned by him, and directed her peels of laughter up towards the sky.

“He’s so heavy with this thing on Emmrich, I can barely breathe!” she gasped. “Gravity,” Manfred informed them cheerfully as Emmrich pulled him off her. He seemed no worse for wear, Rook having broken his fall.

“Yes, and remember, it can be very dangerous, Manfred” Emmrich warned, reaching next for the laughing puddle of splaying midnight wool and woman. “Are you injured?”

“A little flatter maybe, but otherwise fine,” she said, letting him draw her up and pat her down for a more thorough inspection. He didn’t entirely trust Rook’s definition of fine. She applied it rather loosely.

“I wasn’t prepared,” she added, as he skimmed his palms over her forearms, gently manipulating her wrists and elbows for sprains or breaks. She let him, without complaint, indulging his concern with a fond glance. “I don’t actually know if he can move in that thing, Emmrich. Perhaps we should–”

“We can’t remove it,” Emmrich protested, bending her wrist one last time just to be sure, his thumbs rubbing circles into her skin beneath the cuff of wool. “It’s the only thing keeping him safe.”

The corners of her smile tucked in as if she were biting it back and her eyes danced with obvious affection before she gripped his hand in hers and squeezed.

“Alright, then…perhaps one of us could pull him?” She scanned the crowds before her eyes settled on a woman with her child, skating backwards in short, faltering glides as she bent over and held the girl’s hands as she followed. “Like that.”

She shifted back, letting her worn boots glide back over the ice, tugging him with her to demonstrate further. “And the other can follow behind, just in case.”

Emmrich blinked. Then laughed. All these years, he’d been instructing Manfred in proper technique and form and adding more and more padding when it failed to take as well as he’d hoped. But it’d somehow never occurred to him to teach him the way he’d learned with his mother and father.

“What an excellent idea, my love!” he declared, beaming at her and wanting very badly to kiss her again. He might have if Manfred wasn’t eying the both of them with a beseeching emerald glint.

“Skate?” he rasped.

And so that’s what they did. With the sheer weight of the bundled up Manfred, Emmrich was the only one who could pull him without immediately stopping again in short order. Rook did a fair job of keeping up in just her boots, stringing together staccato glides with the practiced grace of someone who’d spent many winters on the frozen Minanter. She helped push Manfred along, falling behind, then catching up just in time to give him another gentle nudge. Not needing the skate poles or to watch where he was going, Manfred was free to throw his head back in glee, his crackling hisses joining Rook’s breathless laughs and Emmrich’s encouragement. With this promising progress, Emmrich finally conceded to removing the bulky gambeson, much to Manfred and Rook’s delight. Without the weight of the padding, they were able to pick up more speed, tracing zig-zags over the ice in their trio processional, Manfred’s cheery red scarf flapping behind him like a colorful woolen tail as he chortled his delight.

And what a difference that made! Not a solitary wobble or stumble, Emmrich was beside himself with pride.

As the beginnings of sunset bloomed over the skyline, deepening it into a spill of pinks and golds the color of the wheels of fried dough slathered in apricot jam sold at his favorite stall, Manfred’s attention fixed on the group of screeching and scampering merchant children sledding gleefully down the gentle slope of the riverbank, popping up at the bottom and racing to the top to do it all over again. With their vivid red, blue, and yellow cloaks, they looked like oversized out of season songbirds fluttering up and down the riverbank in raucous trills and chirps.

“Gravity!” he said.“Sled.”

“Oh, thank the Maker,” Rook puffed as she caught up, her rapid breaths wisping white clouds into the cold. “I’m about to drop.” They skated over towards the shallow riverbank and Emmrich removed Manfred’s skates while Rook went over to a nearby merchant’s stall to haggle over the rental price of one of the simple wooden sledges.

By the time she returned, Manfred was skateless but once again clad in the gambeson.

“There may still be hidden rocks,” Emmrich preempted, even though he needn’t defend himself. There’d been no critique in her smile, only fond exasperation.

“I know I worry–” he began.

“You care,” she corrected, handing over the sledge to Manfred’s outstretched mittens before wrapping her arm back round Emmrich’s so she could nudge his side with her elbow.

“Besides,” she added, as Manfred scampered up the modest incline, hurled the sled into the snow at the top only for it to descend immediately without him, resulting in his outraged cry and subsequent chase.

“I think it’s normal to worry after everything that’s happened. It still doesn’t feel real sometimes. Like this is all a just dream and I’m—” She trailed off, clutching Emmrich’s arm tighter and flashing up a tremulous smile. “But then I take a look at that ridiculous gambeson and I realize there’s no way I could think up something like that on my own.”

Retrieving the sledge, Manfred trecked back up the hill, waddling back and forth to manage the weight of all the padding. They watched him ascend again, this time setting the sledge down carefully, and Emmrich sighed through the tightness in his chest. He’d already lost them once; he couldn’t bear experiencing such a thing again. It would destroy him.

“Sometimes I wish I could put you both in a box where no harm could ever come to you,” he admitted. “It’s…”

Overbearing. Neurotic. Highly impractical.

“A bit much, I know.” He winced down at the top of her head. Her hood had fallen back a bit again, exposing the part of her hair. Such a small thing, that neat little valley, and seeing it, he felt strangely bereft, as if he could still glimpse a world without it out of the corner of his eye.

“Gravity!” Manfred cackled as he cut a path down the slope.

“Don’t worry,” she said, resting her temple against his shoulder the way she always liked to do. “I’m not going anywhere. And neither is Manfred.”

Another promise. Weighter than before. Rook was impulsive in most things and speech was no exception; always starting sentences without knowing how she wanted to finish them. Always in a rush. Always in the moment. A woman in perpetual present tense. But this promise had all the gleam of the future, bright as gold, and it banished those shadows from the edges of his sight.

“Skate with me, darling,” he said, waving Manfred down before he could ascend the slope again and reaching into the pack for her skate blades.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her as he knelt down to lace them over her boots. He meant it the way she meant it: a promise he intended to keep. For as long as he was able. “I’ll be right beside you.”

“Manfred, stay in sight,” Emmrich instructed as he led Rook away from the bank towards the center of the ice, skating backwards and holding her hand so that he could brace her weight as she took her first hesitant steps.

Which shifted into hesitant strides once she found her balance again. Finally, she looked up from her scuffed-up boots to meet his gaze.

“It’s not so different at all,” she said, her grin radiant, eyes luminous with excitement and discovery.

More confident, her strides lengthened and the metal blades whispered against the surface, etching longer and longer criss-crosses of silver over the ice. With increased confidence, all her former grace returned, her hand lightening in his grip as her balance became effortless. She laughed, full and vibrant, and it joined the sound of bells and piccolo on the breeze flitting over the ice.

Emmrich shifted his weight, pulling her closer as their path shifted into a curve—an impossibility on anything but the metal skates.

“There are some differences,” he said, his grin matching hers.

Rook lit up, eyes gleaming with all the possibilities unfolding before her. The nippy Wintermarch air whipped around them as they picked up speed, etching out arcs and looping whorls. He loosened their clasp, a silent invitation, gliding to her side to guide her into a tighter turn. His hand slipped beneath her fluttering cloak, fitting against her waist to steady her as they spirographed across the ice, movements so fluid, they were almost instinctual.

Together, they spun a dizzying gavotte of intricate patterns, threading through a series of fleeting touches. His fingers brushing her waist, her arm, her back, and the playful whisper of her fingertips responded in kind as she spun away, only to return. The world became the rush of air, the crisp bite of frost, and the electric tingle of her ambient magic circling closer.

Distantly, he noticed they’d drifted too close to the bank. But before he could retreat to the safety of the river, as quick as a blink, a red woolen scarf and bundle of knit and shearling cleaved through the gap between them, Manfred chortling with joy and alarm.

Rook cut an impressive turn, neat as a pin, that sent her careening towards the near bank. In a flash of alarm, Emmrich realized he’d yet to show her how to stop on metal skates—something no one had to worry about skating on boot heels alone. He raced for her, grabbing her cloak and yanking her into his arms just as his skate caught on a rough patch of snowy ground and sent them both hurtling into the bank.

The crust of snow crunched beneath them, pillowing their fall and soft as a sigh. No hidden rocks or secret treacheries. Just snow. Still in his arms, Rook twisted to look at him, her hood thrown back askew and her tousled hair frosted all over in white.

“Emmrich—” she said, leaning over him to see if he was unharmed. But he was laughing breathlessly.

And then he was pulling her down into the snow and kissing her.

#emmrich volkarin #emmrich x rook #long post #Wintry WIPs 2024 #dulcidyne writes #Manfred!!!On Ice #veilguard spoilers #The Minanter Frost Fair based on the River Thames frost fairs #Ice skating is a pretty old activity actually!#I headcanon that a lot of Nevarra still uses bone skates (animal of course) even though iron skates have already been invented #Emmrich is an incredible ice skater it's facts #Post-canon #Fluff

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